SWABI, Dec 27: The local commuters including students of various colleges demanded of the district administration here on Thursday to take action against the public transport operators for violating the official fare list.

The commuters gathered at general bus stands at district headquarters and Topi criticised the public transporters for violation of official fare list. The traffic police were ignoring overcharging of commuters by public transporters, they alleged.

The commuters said that they brought the matter into the notice of traffic policemen posted at district headquarters, Topi, Chota Lahor, Shewa Adda and Yar Hussain but they didn’t take any action against the transporters owing to unknown reasons.

Ahmed Ali, a resident of Maneri Bala village, said that they told the owners of passenger coaches that they would inform traffic police about overcharging of commuters. “Go and tell police what they can do,” he quoted the coach owners as saying.

However, the transporters said that they could not get CNG at official rate. “The CNG filling stations run electricity generators and overcharge us by Rs10 per kilogram gas. We just transfer the same to public,” they said.

CNG Owners Association general secretary Fazl Amin, when contacted, said that they did not run generators because it cost them too much. He rejected the allegations of overcharging by CNG filling stations as baseless.

The commuters said that the cleaners of public transport vehicles collected fares from them at the start of journey as they feared that the passengers would refuse to pay extra fares. The tactics had been adopted by transporters across the district, especially in Topi, they said.

“In fact the public transporters are openly violating the fare list issued by district administration as they have increased the fare on all routes by 25 per cent,” said Ali Khan, a resident of Turlandi.

“We were coming to Topi from district headquarters today. The cleaner collected Rs20 from each commuter instead of Rs15,” he added.

Mr Khan said that commuters, travelling on any route, were faced with the same situation.